


No God in the Red Room

by Curator_of_Curiosity



Series: There's Only One God, Ma'am... [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Brotp, Canon Compliant, Catholic Steve Rogers, Eastern Orthodoxy, Gen, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Religious Content, Roman Catholicism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-29 16:54:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20439350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Curator_of_Curiosity/pseuds/Curator_of_Curiosity
Summary: None of Natasha's instructors in the Red Room talked about God. But now that she's free of them, Nat isn't sure what she believes.





	No God in the Red Room

For as long as she can remember, Natasha has been skeptical of religion. She chalks it up to how she was raised. The Soviet Union was an atheist state. None of her instructors talked about God. She didn’t even really think about God until after her graduation.  
“There was no God in the Red Room,” she usually says. It’s a vague enough answer that people don’t ask much more.  
But that hardly meant she never thought about God now. Mostly, it was passing thoughts, vague ideas about what God might look like if he existed. But she didn’t think of it as religion, let alone organized religion.

  
It was hanging out with Rogers that got her thinking about it more, she guesses. Late one night, she found him sitting in the living room looking at the lap-top Tony and Bruce had built him.  
“It’s funny,” she said.  
Steve shut the computer so fast Natasha thought the screen would crack.  
She continued, “Wasn’t it yesterday you were asking Tony how to make Google do ‘the thing’?”  
“I’ve seen a lot of innovation in my day, and Bucky… Bucky was really into science. I’ve picked up on a lot more than Tony realizes. I’m trying to keep up the ruse as long as I can.” Steve looked up at her. “Promise you won’t tell him?”  
Nat smirked. “Not a word.” She nodded to the lap top. “What were you looking at?”  
Steve opened the laptop back up. The glow from the screen lit up Steve’s face with a white light. “Second Vatican Council.”  
Nat knit her brow. “What?”  
“Second Vatican Council,” Steve explained. “Addressed the relationship between the Catholic Church and the modern world. It happened in the Sixties, so I was still in the ice.”  
She looked over his shoulder, reading the article on the screen.  
“I thought you knew I was Catholic,” said Steve.  
“I knew,” said Nat. “You just didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who wakes up in the middle of the night to read about church councils.”  
Steve shrugged. “I’ve got a lot to catch up on.”  
“Still.”  
They talked for a long time. By the next morning, he’d basically left it open for her to join him at Mass.  
“You don’t have to,” he said. “Just if you feel like it.”

  
So she went with him to Mass one Sunday during Lent. She was a little unsettled by how the crucifixes and icons were shrouded in purple and black. It reminded her too much of her graduation, of the man who she had to kill to get out of the Red Room.  
“‘Amen I say to you,’” declared the priest, reading from the lectionary, “‘as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.’”  
And Nat went hollow and heavy in the pit of her stomach.  
She didn’t know what a state of grace is, but she didn’t feel like she was in it. She wasn’t Catholic anyhow, so it was not like it mattered. So she went to the priest with her arms crossed over her chest and her head bowed. But as the priest made the sign of the cross over her, she… felt something. She didn’t know what.  
She didn’t talk to Rogers about it.  
She didn’t want to admit that she didn’t know what it was.

  
Pepper’s sister had a baby. She and Tony were supposed to be the baby’s sponsors. Tony hadn’t been in any sort of religious institution since God knows when. Steve tried to coach him on what to expect, but Tony didn’t seem to listen to any of it. He was more interested in breakfast—or whatever meal it was to him. Tony always kept pretty odd work hours.  
“Cap, Pepper’s not Catholic.” Tony grabbed the milk out of the fridge. “Romanoff? You been to any of these things?”  
“Not sure why you’re asking me, Stark.” She didn’t look up from her phone.  
“Is that a no?”  
Slowly she looked up. She wasn’t sure why she was answering. “Two. Of sorts.”  
Steve furrowed his brows. “When?”  
“When the Red Room took children, they gave them their own sort of baptism. Promised to raise them to serve the Soviet Union.”  
“You’ve seen two of them?” asked Steve.  
Nat nodded. “One was my own. The other was someone else’s.”  
She still remembered the second one. When the officiant had declared the newly-taken child would be covered in a red banner torn by bayonets and bullets rather than by the cross and by prayer, the baby had cried. It was like she’d known the life she would be losing. Nat had always been struck by the hollowness of everything in the Red Room, but it was the Red Baptism that made her most sickened. Instead of parents holding her, promising to love her and raise her to believe what they thought was true, she got some stranger holding her, demanding she kill and die for them, all before she’d ever had the chance to live.  
In a sense, Natasha thought, her graduation had been a twisted Confirmation ceremony.  
She still wonders what happened to that squalling infant girl. She could only hope that little girl had grown up and gotten out somehow.

  
After SHIELD falls, she went off chasing after her parents. She learned something.  
Somewhere in the Volgograd Oblast, she found records in a little wooden church. She calls Steve.  
“You found them?” he asked.  
“They’re dead.” The words come out like a thud.  
Steve was quiet for a while. “Nat, I’m so sorry…”  
Then they were both quiet.  
“Do you know anything more?” he asked.  
“My dad…” Those two words seemed so weird to say. “My dad was a priest.” She paused. “Orthodox priests can—”  
“I know, I know,” said Steve. “Somehow, I didn’t expect your dad to be a priest.”  
“Me neither.” Nat wasn’t sure what she’d expected actually.  
Steve spoke again, “So what are you going to do now?”  
Natasha took a deep breath. “I don’t know.”  
She found the tombstones of her parents, side by side before a chain-link fence. She picked some weeds and places them atop each grave.  
“We have what we have when we have it,” she tells Steve later on.

  
She got back to New York the next Thursday. Steve was there to pick her up at the airport. She didn’t question it until they were driving through Manhattan.  
“When Tony said he’d send me a car,” she said. “I thought he meant he was going to send Happy.”  
Steve shook his head. “I insisted on coming. After that phone call, I got kind of worried about you.” He looked over at her with the concerned fatherly expression he sometimes took on when one of the team was down. “You wanna talk about it?”  
Nat stared at him for a little while. She started to say something, but she stopped herself. She shook her head.  
“Okay,” said Steve.  
There’s an uncomfortable pause. Nat knew he was still expecting her to open up. “Rogers, I really don’t want to talk about it right now. I’m okay. Really.”  
Steve just nodded.  
They were both quiet for a while. She noticed he doesn’t say anything when she puts her feet on the dash. It was like he knew she was secretly not okay. Normally when Steve noticed that kind of thing it ticked her off, but it didn’t bother her anymore, not since those few days before SHIELD fell. Nat just stared out the passenger window, watching the buildings pass her by.  
She noticed a Gothic Revival church built out of bright red brick, stark against the light blue sky. A father and a daughter walked past it—a man in a long black coat holding hands with a little girl in a blue jacket. She pirouetted along the side walk. She looked so serious, but her dad was smiling.  
When Steve stopped at a red light a couple blocks down, she looked over at him.  
“I think I’ll walk from here.”  
She got out of the car and ran down the sidewalk back towards the church. Steve shouted after her, something about how she was going the wrong way, but she tried not to hear him.  
The dad in the little girl were long gone by the time she got there. But the church still stood. Nat felt that same hollow, heavy feeling that she felt during Lent. She swallowed it, shut her eyes and stormed through the doors of the church.  
It was two weeks after Easter, so the altar cloth was gold and the icons weren’t veiled anymore. The first thing that struck her, though, was the color. The images of Christ and Mary and the saints were dressed in bright reds and touches of blue-green. Everything inside the church was glowing and golden and beautiful.  
The church wasn’t empty. There’s a few people milling about. She smiled and nodded at them before sitting down in a pew and pretending to pray. She’d actually pray, but she wasn’t sure how. For all the religion the Red Room tried to replace, they couldn’t quite duplicate that.  
Steve walked in from the back of the church, out of breath from chasing her down. He made the sign of the cross, like the good Catholic boy he was.  
“Natasha, what—” He saw her kneeling in the pew and he stopped. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”  
“It’s fine.” Nat got up and sat down in the pew.  
Steve sat down next to her. “Are you okay?”  
Nat shrugged. “Depends on your definition of ‘okay’.” She looked up at arc of gold icons that hovered on the wall over the altar. “I don’t think I ever thanked you for inviting me to Mass that time.”  
“You don’t have to,” said Steve. “Everyone was glad to have you.” He knit his brow at her. “I thought Mass made you uncomfortable.”  
“Some of it,” said Nat. “But one thing didn’t.” She took a deep breath. “There was… during the Eucharist. When the priest blessed me. I felt something. I wasn’t totally sure what before.”  
“Do you know now?” Steve asked.  
Nat looked at the icon of a woman holding a jar of perfume. “I guess for a second I felt forgiven.”  
Steve nodded, like he understood.  
Nat sighed. “I don’t know. I’m still not sure about all this, Rogers.” She looked over at him. “But sometimes I just wonder.”

**Author's Note:**

> I based the idea for the Red Room's pseudo-religious practices on Soviet attempts to supplant the Eastern Orthodox Church in Russia by creating ceremonies and rituals intended to replace Christian practices.
> 
> Part of the same series as "Without A Body".


End file.
